UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that more than one million species on Earth are currently threatened with extinction, calling for more decisive action to address biodiversity loss, climate change and pollution. He made the remarks on October 16 at the Leaders' Summit on Biodiversity held in Yerevan as part of COP17.

Guterres thanked the Armenian government for organizing the important summit and for the opportunity to experience the wonders of the Caucasus. He said the region’s landscapes and everything they encompassed served as a reminder of why the participants had gathered.

He stressed that biodiversity provided humanity with food, water and the air people breathed. However, humanity was steadily cutting away more branches of the tree of life. Climate chaos, overgrazing, overfishing, excessive fertilizer use, pesticides, plastics and heavy metals were among the factors exacerbating the triple planetary crisis of pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change.

More than one million species on Earth were now threatened with extinction, bringing humanity closer to a world unfit for life, Guterres warned. However, he emphasized that this outcome was not inevitable. Four years earlier, world leaders had agreed on a plan of action in Montreal. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework had charted a path toward reconciliation with nature, but that had only been the beginning.

Guterres called for more decisive action, greater speed and firm commitment. With only four years remaining until 2030, the Yerevan meeting represented a moment of accountability, he said, urging countries to assess whether they were doing enough.

He noted both positive and negative developments. The Global Biodiversity Framework had inspired action around the world: nearly 90% of the parties to the Convention had established national biodiversity targets, while more than half had developed their own national roadmaps for achieving them.

Since 2022, an additional 1.3 million square kilometers of land and six million square kilometers of ocean had been brought under formal protection. However, progress remained uneven and extremely slow. Even if current national commitments were fulfilled, only 26% of terrestrial ecosystems and 12% of marine ecosystems would be protected by 2030. These figures fell significantly short of the commitment made in Montreal to protect 30% of land and marine areas by that year.

Guterres also pointed to serious gaps in targets related to economic systems, as well as persistent shortages of key resources needed to make progress, including funding, capacity, cooperation and high-quality data.

Funding for biodiversity conservation amounted to less than half of the $200 billion agreed upon under the framework, he said. The world was grappling with conflicts, climate shocks, food insecurity, the threat of epidemics and many other challenges. Biodiversity loss could not be addressed in isolation, as resolving any of these crises required a comprehensive approach that accounted for all of them.

Guterres stressed that there was no time to lose and called for leadership in three key areas.

The first was leadership at the government level. The 30 by 30 target—to conserve 30% of land and ocean areas by 2030—reflected scientific evidence and demonstrated a commitment to multilateral cooperation. Achieving the targets would require a fundamental shift away from policies that damaged nature toward practices that sustained it. These included adopting zero-waste and circular economy principles, transitioning to sustainable and regenerative agriculture, ensuring transparent monitoring and reporting, and enforcing existing laws more rigorously.

Guterres welcomed the Yerevan Declaration, whose authors sought to make the conference a turning point for the planet and ensure that biodiversity considerations were incorporated into every government decision, whether involving policymaking, budgeting or legislation.

The second area was financial leadership. Guterres argued that global spending priorities remained deeply misguided: for every dollar invested in protecting nature, $30 was spent destroying it. In 2023, $7.33 trillion had been directed toward activities harmful to the environment.

Polluting heavy industry, agribusiness that depleted land resources and, above all, fossil fuels were among the destructive forces, he said. Subsidizing fossil fuels was effectively subsidizing suicide because it overheated the planet and destroyed biodiversity. Guterres called on governments worldwide to end such support once and for all and redirect the funds toward the well-being of people and the planet.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, annual investment in nature-based solutions needed to reach $571 billion by 2030 to achieve global targets for biodiversity, climate and land restoration.

Guterres described this as a small price to pay for preserving an Earth capable of sustaining life. Governments could not meet the challenge alone, however, and the private sector needed to take active steps as well. The Cali Fund was an innovative financial mechanism that enabled companies profiting from nature to contribute to its protection. He urged businesses worldwide to participate and called on governments to create incentives for such contributions.

In renewable energy, he noted, businesses were already leading the way. Global investment in clean energy now nearly doubled investment in fossil fuels. In the previous year alone, the use of renewable energy had prevented carbon emissions equivalent to the combined emissions of the United States, the European Union and Japan.

An increasing number of countries were seeking to free themselves from dependence on volatile and exploitative fossil fuel markets. However, the benefits were unevenly distributed around the world. Heavy debt burdens, limited fiscal capacity and an unfair international financial system were forcing many developing countries to choose between protecting nature and ensuring people's well-being. Yet sustainable development was impossible without addressing both, Guterres stressed.

World leaders had committed to correcting this injustice by increasing domestic and international development financing; ensuring that multilateral development banks substantially increased their investments; securing new capital from the banks’ shareholders to expand concessional financing and attract private investment; and reforming the global financial architecture.

These changes were necessary to ensure that developing countries had a voice and influence commensurate with present-day economic realities, he said.

The third area was leadership and accountability at every level of society. Environmental degradation often hit the most vulnerable communities hardest, even though they were the least responsible for causing the problem. Yet these communities were also frequently a source of solutions.

Guterres highlighted the innovative ideas of young people, the energy of civil society, the active participation of women, and, above all, the leadership of Indigenous peoples and local communities. Placing Indigenous knowledge at the forefront of biodiversity conservation would allow humanity to draw on one of its most powerful forms of artificial intelligence: the intelligence of its ancestors. These practices, developed over thousands of years, could help humanity rediscover harmony with the land, sea and sky.

Guterres noted that he had 76 days remaining in his tenure as UN secretary-general. Over more than a decade in office, addressing the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution had been one of his main priorities. This commitment was also personal, he explained, as he, like many others, had children and grandchildren who were counting on the current generation to become guardians of nature.

In nature, he concluded, leaders were those who cared for others. Humanity needed to embrace the same role as responsible stewards and act without delay in response to the urgency of the moment, for the sake of future generations and all life on Earth.